Decisions, decisions... Where are they?

[Boracks]

In my opinion, one thing lacking from the game is the amount of decision making that prior Civ games have had. Whether its the turn by turn ones (where do I move this unit?), the medium range ones (what to build, when to start a war, when to go for a wonder) or the long range choices (who's my friend or enemy, what cities specialize, what long term tech goals), this version just doesn't seem to have that feel of making that many decisions.

I've seen a number of posts griping about wanting an end turn button. And I have had a number of games where there have been lengthy stretches of hitting the 'End Turn' as quick as possible because there's nothing else to do, or even think about.

This affects the pace of the game, and the pacing is off.

I'm not sure what the issue is, much less a possible solution, so I thought I'd throw this out and see what constructive commentary the community could come up with. Besides going back to Civ4.

[Shogun Gunner]

I wish I read your post before posting on the other thread. What you highlight is exactly what throws me off of this version of civ.

I like the grand sweep of history that civ used to inspire. This version makes me feel like a spectator not a participant or leader of my nation.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

they are in previous versions of Civ... kicked out so that Civ V would appear fresh.

[alicedong]

they are in previous versions of Civ... kicked out so that Civ V would appear fresh.

[Skybird]

For me, the start of the game in terms of choice is significantly weaker than IV. Possibly because of no religion. I always seem to default now, when playing Askia, to getting a worker, and heading straight towards philosophy to get the free mud pyramid mosques in my first few cities due to the change in policies from the last patch. this gives such a massive, free, boost to culture, that I have yet to find a better starting strategy. Even if you don't go for a cultural victory, the policies that boost growth and worker rate are critical to obtain. Things seem to become more varied once you meet some CS's and other players.

[Dinner]

People should read Sulla's updated review of Civ5 which he wrote shortly after the latest patch came out. It's scathing but spot on and it deals specifically with the lack of decisions in the game.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

[OneFootInTheGrave]

thanks for highlighting this commentary - I don't really check his page even though he is spot on about Civ V (personally I thought he already gave up, as I did), but kudos to Sulla for trying.

& 1UPT image = priceless

and Civ V is not yet on the level of Civ III when it was released, let alone any other civ game (perhaps CTPII was more broken on release before modders fixed it, but there was a good core of a game there to start with, unlike Civ V).

edit: I also learned now, that the thing which happens with 1UPT in late game is called "carpet of doom" ... really appropriate... bring back SOD

plus this deserves it's own thread...

[Dinner]

Yep, the carpet of doom is vastly worse then the stack of doom ever was. It's a completely broken system.

"I believe that these problems stem directly from the decision to make civ V a one-unit-per-tile (1UPT) game. 1UPT allows a lot of flexibility in how you arrange your army; however, it only works if your army has empty space to move in. It requires an army smaller than the map. 1UPT led to small army sizes, which led to lower production and faster science, which led to the broken economy system that this game has now. The combat in civ V was based on panzer general, but that doesn't work well in a civ style game. I tried to explain why that is in this post: (In PG, England is about 500 hexes. That's enough room for very large armies to maneuver around in (and even so, things get pretty congested when you're fighting over london). In Civ V, England is only 6 hexes! What am I supposed to do there? That's not even enough room to build a proper city! The English channel is only 4 hexes and one hex wide, so you can shoot across it with archers. Poor Italy has it worst though- only 2 hexes for the Italian peninsula! And the mediterranean is only 1 tile wide! Now that's an earth map, but the same sort of problems happen on any map I play. Tight spaces, bottlenecks, absolutely no room to maneuver. Civ V warfare is just a traffic jam.)

Clearly this was a decision made early on, since it's such an important part of the game. At the same time, they wanted to keep the "civ" feel to the game, where you settle new cities, build improvements and city buildings, and go in to the city screen to adjust your citizens. Combined, this meant that they had to limit the total number of tiles in the game, and so they tried to force army sizes to be very small. A typical civ 4 army of ~50 units would be incredibly annoying to manage in the Civ V style, so they wanted to encourage armies of only 5~10 units. I hope this succession game showed how clunky warfare becomes in this game when the army sizes get large (I enjoy the early wars with small army sizes). The AI can't handle it, and the player doesn't enjoy it.

In order to do that, they had to limit production. You can see that in the decreased yields- production and food yield have been decreased compared to civ 4, whereas the food required to grow a city was greatly increased. The early units like warriors don't take very long to build, but the cost of units quickly increases. The high upkeep costs for units, buildings, and roads factor in to this as well (see my sig: Civ5 is the first Civ game that is about NOT building instead of building. Don't build troops since support is so high, don't build buildings because support is too high, don't build roads because.... yada yada yada). The idea was, I think, that every new military unit would take about 10~20 turns to build, just enough to replace your losses while you continually upgraded your original army. As a result, your army size would stay almost constant throughout the game.

Also, it's worth pointing out that there's two ways of effectively decreasing production. Either decrease hammer yields while increasing costs- which they did- or to make science go faster- which they also did. The beaker cost of techs decreased, great scientists became more powerful, and research agreements were added. All of these accelerated the tech pace, giving less time to build the units/buildings for each technology, which effectively decreased production.

So now the developers are stuck with a game that has greatly reduced production values. That's fine, except for one thing- what do they do in the early game? They can't expect us to just sit around clicking "next turn" for 40 turns waiting for our worker to finish, or 100 turns for a library to finish. It's bad enough that it already takes up to 15 turns to finish that first worker. So, they had to make the early stuff a bit cheaper. You can build a warrior in ~6 turns, and you can build a horseman or a library in ~10. Even a coloseum only takes ~20. The idea was that a small city was efficient enough to produce the early game stuff in a reasonable amount of time, and as the city grew, it would produce the later stuff in the same amount of time- keeping army size constant while the cities grew and built infrastructure. There would be no massive increases in the power of a city with its size (like civ 4 had) because if a city became really powerful, it could create huge armies which would break the 1UPT system. If large cities were only modestly more powerful than small cities, the army sizes would stay small. That's pretty much what I discovered when I tried a game limited to just 3 large cities.

What the developers overlooked was that we're not limited to just a few large cities- we can build as many small cities as we want! Granted, we're limited a bit by happiness, but there's a lot of ways to solve that little problem (like keeping the city size small). And since small cities are so efficient at building the early game stuff, and large cities never become vastly more powerful, the many small cities with their trading posts (even without any multipliers) will quickly outproduce the large cities with their mines, despite their forges and workshops.

The game is in an awkward situation where large cities can't be too good because it would imbalance the middle and late game, but small cities have to be good or else the early game would be boring. And of course science is shared between all cities, so the more cities you have, the faster science goes, without any corresponding increase in city production. The result is what we've got now- a large number of small, undeveloped cities can produce a collossal amount of gold and science, which allows us to outtech even a large deity AI, while producing anything we want.

I know a lot of people will suggest balance tweaks to fix this. But I don't think this can be solved adequately without somehow addressing the issue of 1UPT at civ scale. You can't give an incentive to make large, developed cities better because that will just make that late game even faster and more unit-clogged than it is now. You can't make small, undeveloped cities weaker because than the early game will just be excruciatingly slow and boring.

So what do we have now? Thanks to 1UPT, we've got a game that tries hard to limit production because large armies break the 1UPT system. To limit production as the game goes on, large cities increase their production very slowly relative to science. This means that small cities remain competative throughout the entire game. This, combined with the many loopholes in the happiness system, allow an empire of many small cities to massively outproduce and outtech an empire of a few large cities, so the 1UPT is broken anyway with a massive clog of advanced units, early in the game. In my opinion, this is not fixable without severe changes to the game, such as bringing back stacks or greatly increasing the minimum distance between cities."

[a.kitman]

i agree whit alot what sulla is saying but but he is dead wrong on 1upt. carpet of doom is pretty easy to solv. he even acknowledge somewhere in there that its fun in the begining of the game whit a small number of units.

also maybe i need to reinstall civ 4 cus it wasnt all golden roses whit cookies and sunshine like alot here are saying. atleast not from what i remeber. from what i remeber civ 4 vanilla have about as many options and choises as civ 5 does.

[Dinner]

Civ4 is without a doubt the best Civilization game of the entire series, bar none. It's simply the best there has been and likely to be the best there ever will be since the owners of the franchise seem determined to ruin it. I can think of several ways to improve the game but other then a hex map instead of a square map Firaxis hasn't tried one of them and instead has been determined to make the game worse from a design stand point. IMO the smaller number of units makes the game much worse, especially for MP, because losing a single unit means you are at a major disadvantage in an MP game. Not that anyone even bothers to play Civ5 MP.

[Proteus_MST]

...IMO the smaller number of units makes the game much worse, especially for MP, because losing a single unit means you are at a major disadvantage in an MP game. Not that anyone even bothers to play Civ5 MP.

It is even worse in single player (at least for the AI)
destroy the main army of an AI player and his nation is ripe for the picking.
He´s worse than an NI (Natural Intelligence) player at coping with losses during a war

[a.kitman]

i want a empire building game not a unit building game.

and yeah oerding iam sure they made a bad game by choise. seriously listen to yourself.

hade civ v been just an expansion pack of civ iv you would of been complaining about that. fine civ v isnt as good as iv but they tried something new and it has potential. if you get your head out of your ass you will see that.

[wodan11]

I read Sulla's analysis. It's both hard-hitting and a good analysis while being too theoretically abstract in the game design goals it offers as the ideal. For example, many of these game design goals are not met by Civ4.

Not that Civ4 is perfect by any means, but once I realized that, I had to ask myself did Sulla have an ulterior motive in his review of Civ5. Was he honestly trying to point out the direction to success, or was it something else?

Anyway, I'm not out to pan Sulla. As I said, he offers many good insights. But it's far from an objective analysis of Civ5 from a game design perspective.

[Ming]

He does have some good and solid insights. However, he works too hard to fit everything into his single notion against 1UPT. He also is making some huge assumptions in the area of the games design. I think he is letting his anger that the game isn't what he wanted take him over the edge

But yes, he raises "some" good points. Unfortunately, he took it way too far.

[Shogun Gunner]

Last weekend I went back to civ 4 for awhile. I'll sit out of more beta testing for civ 5. Sulla's comment about being distracted by the radio is EXACTLY when playing civ 5. A good civ game entices your concentrate to the point that you aren't aware of the surroundings or the time. This is one of the best intangibles of series, but unfortunately not captured at all in the latest release.